It is a well-known story--a violent husband abuses his wife
and others, the wife stays with him out of fear or shame, and in
the end the husband kills the wife, or the children, or both. We
shake our heads and say "If only we could have protected her."
Such is the scenario of the Socorro Caro triple murders,
except that this time the genders are reversed. The Southern
California case is an extreme example of the price children,
fathers, and our society as a whole sometimes pay for our
refusal to acknowledge female domestic violence.
Socorro Caro, according to testimony by several witnesses,
including her husband Dr. Xavier Caro, had violently attacked
her husband or others on eight occasions prior to the night of
November 22, 1999, when she shot and killed three of her four
sons. In these previous incidents Ms. Caro had used weapons and
the element of surprise to her advantage, and had caused several
injuries, including serious eye damage to her husband.
Why didn't Dr. Caro leave her? Why didn't he tell anybody
what was being done to him?
"I was ashamed. I was embarrassed," he testified recently
during the penalty phase of Socorro Caro's trial. According to
other reports, he was also skeptical that authorities would
believe him.
Thanks to the noble efforts of women's activists, had Ms.
Caro been the victim of abuse at the hands of Dr. Caro, help
would have been available. Ms. Caro could have moved with her
children to a shelter. Using the legal services of the shelter,
she could have filed a restraining order against her violent
husband, and filed for divorce. She would have received custody
of her four children, their home, half or more of the family's
financial assets, and substantial child support. In addition,
she probably would have been able to eliminate her abusive
husband's visitation rights.
Had Dr. Caro, a male victim of domestic violence, felt that
the legal system would give his claims the same credence that an
abused woman's claims receive, his three children would probably
still be alive today.
Are female child abuse and domestic violence rare?
Unfortunately not. According to the US Department of Justice,
70% of confirmed cases of child abuse and 65% of parental
murders of children are committed by mothers.
Veteran domestic violence researchers Richard Gelles, Murray
Straus, and Susan Steinmetz, who were once hailed by the women's
movement for their pioneering work on violence against women,
have repeatedly found that women are as likely as men to
physically attack their spouses or partners.
California State Long Beach Psychology professor Martin
Fiebert has compiled and summarized 117 different studies with
over 72,000 respondents that found that most domestic violence
is mutual and, in the cases where there was only one abusive
partner, that partner was as likely to be female as male.
Crime statistics do not bear out what researchers know
because women tend to be seriously injured more often than men,
and because men, for various reasons, are far less likely than
women to report the abuse against them.
As the Caro case shows, by allowing abusive women to go
unacknowledged and unpunished, female abusers are encouraged to
believe that they can get away with their abuse indefinitely,
which frequently results in escalating violence.
Why didn't Dr. Caro seek help? Besides shame and denial, many
men hesitate to report their wives' violence because they fear
that once the police are involved, the wife will accuse her
husband of being the perpetrator and it is she, not he, who will
be believed. This is, in fact, what Ms. Caro tried to do during
her murder trial, claiming that it was her husband, not her, who
committed the murders. Draconian mandatory arrest laws often
direct police to make an arrest, even when the abuse is mutual
(as research shows is generally the case), or when it is unclear
who the perpetrator is. While arrests of women account for a
third or more of domestic violence arrests in some states,
police generally are pressured to arrest the man, even when the
evidence is scant.
What could Dr. Caro have done? There are few domestic
violence shelters which accept men, though in this case he
probably would have had enough money to pay for other
accommodations. He would have had difficulty winning a custody
battle, particularly with the well-documented willingness of
women in danger of losing custody to make false accusations of
abuse or child molestation. Quite possibly these accusations or
other legal machinations could have led to Ms. Caro being
granted custody of the children, and even to Dr. Caro losing
visitation rights. Thus his children could have been in the care
of and under the control of an abuser without even the limited
protection he could provide by staying with her.
Xavier Caro was trapped--not just by his violent wife, but by
a society that refuses to acknowledge what voluminous research
and simple common sense shows--domestic violence is not a male
affliction but a human one.
Glenn Sacks' columns have appeared in the San Diego
Union-Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles
Times, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Los Angeles Daily News,
and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He invites readers to visit his
website at www.GlennJSacks.com.
